Ted Cruz Meets New York Values

As part of his New York primary campaign, Ted Cruz appeared at a restaurant in the Bronx, a borough that contains some of the most partisan Democratic congressional districts in the country.

Photograph by Bryan Thomas / Getty

“Show us your matzo, pick up your matzo!” a man enjoined Senator Ted Cruz and a group of small children at the Chabad Neshama Center, in Brighton Beach, last week. Cruz had been diligently rolling dough alongside them at a table set up in the center’s model bakery. And he sang, or moved his lips to, the Passover song “Dayenu,” or “It would be enough.” Given that, in other states, Cruz had tried to drum up votes by insulting “New York values,” it might have been expected that someone would empty a bag of flour over his head. But New York is a tolerant and welcoming city, and so, instead, the candidate was given freshly baked matzo, which he ate with a smile. Cruz is not going to get what he deserves in New York. Instead, he might get what he wants.

One of the many outrageous things about Cruz’s characterization of New York values is his assertion that Trump, an anti-immigrant candidate in a city of immigrants, “embodies” them. Only in this Republican race would a wealthy developer who refuses to apologize for having called for the execution of the Central Park Five—who were fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen years old when they were wrongly accused of rape—be regarded as a tribune of the urban crowd. (Cruz set him up for that role by leaving it to Trump to remind voters, at a debate in which New York was being disparaged, how honorably the city handled itself after the September 11th attacks.) In the latest Real Clear Politics average of polls of Republican primary voters, Trump gets about fifty-four per cent, Kasich twenty-one, and Cruz close to nineteen. Because of the intricacies of this state’s Republican delegate-allocation system, the proportion of delegates Trump gets will be greater than that. But Cruz, as it turns out, might get a decent number of them, too.

There are ninety-five total Republican delegates up for grabs in New York; eighty-one are divided evenly among the state’s twenty-seven congressional districts. If a candidate gets more than fifty per cent of the vote in a district, he gets all three of that district’s delegates. If not, the winner gets two and the candidate in second place gets one. There are also fourteen statewide delegates; if Trump gets a majority of the total vote, he wins them all. In some districts, Kasich might pick up a delegate even if he is a distant second, which is why he could be seen eating anything he was offered on Arthur Avenue last week. But the system rewards two qualities that distinguish Cruz: a finely honed data operation and an uncanny ability to absorb humiliation. It might, on the face of it, seem like an amusing out-of-towner move for him to campaign in the South Bronx, as he also did last week. It is part of New York’s Fifteenth Congressional District, which, according to the Cook Political Report, is the most partisan Democratic district not only in the state but in the entire country. Cruz got Bronx-cheered on his way to an appearance, at a Chinese-Dominican restaurant called Sabrosura 2, where he met with a few dozen pastors assembled by Rubén Díaz, a conservative Democratic state senator, who, for reasons that seem unconnected to any region’s values, wore a cowboy hat. The _Daily News _called it a “bungled boro tour,” and the Post said that the event was “a dud” because, other than the pastors, only a handful of people showed up for reasons other than yelling at Cruz to go away. Cruz, though, later called the meeting “tremendous,” and in terms of delegate-assembling efficiency he may be right. There are about five hundred and fifty thousand Democrats in the Bronx, and only about forty-eight thousand Republicans. When there are hardly any Republicans around, you don’t have to persuade many people to vote for you to win the Republican primary. There has been some redistricting since 2012, but Romney won what was then the Sixteenth District (like the Fifteenth, entirely in the Bronx) with a hundred and fifty-one out of two hundred and eighty-five Republican votes cast—a number of people who could probably fit in Sabrosura 2. The Cruz campaign is, as it has shown in other states, capable of finding those people and knocking on their doors. This means that Cruz has a shot at winning a delegate, or even three, in the district that includes Yankee Stadium.

When Maria Bartiromo, of Fox, asked him, at a debate in January, what he meant by “New York values,” he said, “I think most people know exactly what New York values are.” When Bartiromo pushed him, saying, “I am from New York. I don’t,” Cruz saw the chance for a little joke. “What—what—you’re from New York? So you might not.” There was laughter, as Cruz continued, “But I promise you, in the state of South Carolina, they do.” He added a few words about liberals and a “focus around media and money,” but his own focus was on telling voters that “New York values” was shorthand for pretty much anything that they regarded as suspicious and alien. “As I travel the country here in Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Nevada, everyone knows what New York values are,” he told ABC News, after winning Iowa. He contrasted New York values to “reasonable, common-sense,” and “Judeo-Christian” values. Cruz’s commitment to divisiveness is such that he has begun telling hardworking New Yorkers that they don’t have what he calls New York values—only the state’s “liberal politicians” do. As for the media and the money, Cruz has been assiduous about seeking them at fund-raisers in New York, though he took a break this weekend to look for money at an “investor summit” for big donors in Las Vegas.

The New York primary is limited to registered Republicans, and, although new voters could sign up until a couple of weeks ago, the deadline for someone who was already registered to change (or, for independents, to add) a party affiliation was last October, further limiting the pool. (That early date seems to have tripped up Ivanka and Eric Trump, who were registered but not enrolled in the G.O.P., and now can’t vote for their father.) There are also Republican voters who can be effectively reached through community leaders, for example, among the ultra-Orthodox Jews of Brooklyn, who may be ideologically aligned with Cruz on Israel and on the issue of religious exemptions from various laws. The majority of the ultra-Orthodox are registered Democrats, but an increasing number are Republicans, and their votes will matter in districts like the Eighth and Ninth in Brooklyn—which are diverse and overwhelmingly Democratic—precisely because of the small numbers. Everything about the way that Cruz has run so far indicates that this is the sort of thing he is good at. On Saturday, he completed his capture of all of the available delegates in Colorado, a state that had a series of Party conventions rather than primaries or Iowa-like caucuses. On “Meet the Press,” Paul Manafort, the Republican operative whom Trump has hired to run his delegate operation, accused the Cruz campaign of engaging in “Gestapo tactics,” a phrase that may have been meant to invoke not (or not only) the Nazis but the Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff’s use of the same term at the 1968 Chicago Convention, where police beat protesters in a scene of “turmoil and violence.” That’s an image, as Evan Osnos has noted, that the Trump campaign might want the rest of the G.O.P. to have in mind as it maneuvers to deny him the nomination. For all Cruz’s New York machinations, Trump is on track to win more delegates. It will be almost impossible for Cruz to actually overtake him. But he might prevent Trump from getting an outright majority on the first ballot at the Party convention. Dayenu—for Cruz, that might be enough.

Amy Davidson Sorkin has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2014.

Cruz has the partisan ferocity of the culture warrior, but he is a warrior without a war.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.